Short talk with Sergey Burkatovski – SerB (World of Tanks)

SerB gave this interview for “Навигатор игрового мира”, Russian gaming portal, and our Russian friend sent us the translated version of it. As you all know when game started he was often seen in public, answering the questions, but after couple of years he decided to retire from public, so this one is really rare.

Q: Couple of years ago you were saying that reasons behind popularity of World of Tanks are some lucky solutions, focusing online playing, free 2 play and theme that is very interesting for former USSR countries. But that was very risky way that made Wargaming top dog in that branch.

SerB: Wargaming is not something abstract, Wargaming is above all people that work very hard. The first one that came to company was Slava Makarov and after that he invited me to join in. At that point both of us had experience in MMO and free 2 play games, and above all we had real life experience with tanks. (They both served in tank battalions in army.)

Q: Is there anything in the game that you would especially like to change?

SerB: There is a saying that says “After the battle everyone can be a general.” that saying can be used everywhere and ofc in computer games world. If we could start over again we would change some tank lines, perhaps game mechanics, not by much, but the game itself we wouldn’t change. World of Tanks is the pioneer in the genre (tank battle online games), and overall we would change some stuff, but things turned out this way pretty good.

Q: Every year we get one new nation in game. How many time will pas until you pass that rule, as there will be no more nations to introduce?

SerB:Soon we will have Swedish tanks in game. We also have Italians we descent beginning and middle of the branch, but there is a very big problem with top-tier tanks of the Italian line. We had and idea to introduce Polish nation to the game, but problem was that Poland got occupied in 1939. and hasn’t managed to develop much of it’s own tanks. nevertheless there are some pretty interesting tanks from Poland, and filling the gaps with Soviet era tanks seems like a good idea. We really work hard to find some original info’s, so we dig trough archives to find something interesting. What else? It may happen that we finally manage to make Israeli branch. With them we have other problems, their only original tank is Merkava, but that tank is too modern to get in to the game. So the only option is to take some early prototype of it, while other Israeli tanks are just clones of other nations vehicles, and it will be really hard to make something out of it. Of course all nations have limits but there are many tanks that I would like to introduce to the game. We have Cuban tanks, and one of my favorite Argentinean that I would really like to introduce.

Q: What makes that tank so special?

SerB: It has interesting name “Nahuel” (or on Russian “Нахуэль”) everyone that speaks Russian knows the meaning of that word, so I think that players will love it. (We will leave you to go to Google translate to check it out)

Q: In your opinion, what is the reason behind such bad success of World of Warplanes and World of Warships?

SerB: World of Warplanes project is simply unsuccessful, but the mistakes we made are now removed. With World of Warships situation is much complex. In Russia alone Warships can’t take many players, but in Asia they are very successful. At the moment it is very hard to make competition for World of Tanks even for us.

Q: At this point couple of companies are trying to develop games that have similar gameplay, and they are all from former USSR. Why doesn’t sbd like EA Games or Blizzard try to make something similar to World of Tanks?

SerB: One of those games come from Obsidion, which is company from Russia. Besides them similar stuff could make some company from Germany, bcs for USA players WW2 means Pacific and fleets. Of course British, Italians and Americans participated in ground fights, but main battle on land was fought between us (Russians) and Germans. The biggest problem is that Germans would like to forget that part of their history, once we asked one German car company to let us search trough their archives for some tanks designs and they turned us down. Of course there is always a chance that Americans or Japanese studios make something like WoT. After all we all remember Japanese game – Panzer front, that had very interesting tank E-79 , who’s crew were gnomes, bcs any normal person wouldn’t fit. But it was cool looking. We actually thought of buying license for that thing.

That’s it boys and girls, if you had a chance to ask SerB anything, what would it be? Stay stronK!

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TWB [The Wild Bunch] is a Professional eSports team based in Serbia founded in June of 2015 by Nebojsa "Mr_Kela" Filipovic. At The Wild Bunch we strive to be the best there is and let no team stand in our way. Our players have years of experience behind them and put in many hours in each day to practice and get better at the game. We work in close collaboration with our sponsors to help fund and bring out the best our team has to offer.